Authors: Hanif Kureishi
One afternoon in the autumn, after we have met four or five
times, it is wet, and Florence and I sit at a table inside the damp teahouse. The only other customers are an elderly couple. Florence’s son sits on the floor drawing.
‘Can’t we get a beer?’ Florence says.
‘They don’t sell it here.’
‘What a damned country.’
‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’
She says, ‘Can you be bothered?’
‘Nope.’
Earlier I notice the smell of alcohol on her. It is a retreat I recognise; I have started to drink with more purpose myself.
While I am at the counter fetching the tea, I see Florence holding the menu at arm’s length; then she brings it closer to her face and moves it away again, seeking the range at which it will be readable. Earlier I noticed a spectacle case in the top of her bag, but had not realised they were reading glasses.
When I sit down, Florence says, ‘Last night Archie and I went to see your new film. It was discomfiting to sit there looking at you with him.’
‘Did Archie remember me?’
‘At the end I asked him. He remembered the weekend. He said you had more substance to you than most actors. You helped him.’
‘I hope not.’
‘I don’t know what you two talked about that night, but a few months after your conversation Archie left his job and went into publishing. He accepted a salary cut, but he was
determined to find work that didn’t depress him. Oddly, he turned out to be very good at it. He’s doing well. Like you.’
‘Me? But that is only because of you.’ I want to give her credit for teaching me something about self-belief and self-determination. ‘Without you I wouldn’t have got off to a good start …’
My thanks make her uncomfortable, as if I am reminding her of a capacity she does not want to know she is wasting.
‘But it’s your advice I want,’ she says anxiously. ‘Be straight, as I was with you. Do you think I can return to acting?’
‘Are you seriously considering it?’
‘It’s the only thing I want for myself.’
‘Florence, I read with you years ago but I have never seen you on stage. That aside, the theatre is not a profession you can return to at will.’
‘I’ve started sending my photograph around,’ she continues. ‘I want to play the great parts, the women in Chekhov and Ibsen. I want to howl and rage with passion and fury. Is that funny? Rob, tell me if I’m being a fool. Archie considers it a middle-aged madness.’
‘I am all for that,’ I say.
As we part she touches my arm and says, ‘Rob, I saw you the other day. I don’t think you saw me, or did you?’
‘But I would have spoken.’
‘You were shopping in the deli. Was that your wife? The blonde girl –’
‘It was someone else. She has a room nearby.’
‘And you –’
‘Florence –’
‘I don’t want to pry,’ she says. ‘But you used to put your hand on my back, to guide me, like that, through crowds …’
I do not like being recognised with the girl for fear of it getting in the papers and back to my wife. But I resent having to live a secret life. I am confused.
‘I was jealous,’ she says.
‘Were you? But why?’
‘I had started to hope … that it wasn’t too late for you and me. I think I care for you more than I do for anybody. That is rare, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve never understood you,’ I say, irritably. ‘Why would you marry Archie … and then start seeing me?’
It is a question I have never been able to put, fearing she will think I am being critical of her, or that I will have to hear an account of their ultimate compatibility.
She says, ‘I hate to admit it, but I imagined in some superstitious way that marriage would solve my problems and make me feel secure.’ When I laugh she looks at me hard. ‘This raises a question that we both have to ask.’
‘What is that?’
She glances at her son and says softly, ‘Why do you and I go with people who won’t give us enough?’
I say nothing for a time. Then follows the joke which is not a joke, but which makes us laugh freely for the first time since we met again. I have been reading an account by a contemporary
author of his break up with his partner. It is relentless, and, probably because it rings true, has been taken exception to. Playfully I tell Florence that surely divorce is an underestimated pleasure. People speak of the violence of separation, but what of the delight? What could be more refreshing than never having to sleep in the same bed as that rebarbative body, and hear those familiar complaints? Such a moment of deliverance would be one to hug to yourself for ever, like losing one’s virginity, or becoming a millionaire.
I stand at the door of the teahouse to watch her walk back across the park, under the trees; she carries a white umbrella, treading so lightly she barely disturbs the rain drops on the grass, her son running ahead of her. I am certain I can hear laughter hanging in the air like an ethereal jinn.
The next time I see her she comes at me quickly, kissing me on both cheeks and saying she wants to tell me something.
We take the kids to a pub with a garden. I have started to like her shaven-headed boy, Ben, having at first not known how to speak to him. ‘Like a human being,’ I decide, is the best method. We put my son on a coat on the ground and he bustles about on his hands and bandy legs, nose down, arse sticking out. Ben chases him and hides; the baby’s laugh makes us all laugh. Others’ pleasure in him increases mine. It has taken a while, but I am getting used to serving and enjoying him, rather than seeing what I want as the important thing.
‘Rob, I’ve got a job,’ she says. ‘I wrote to them and went in
and auditioned. It’s a pub theatre, a basement smelling of beer and damp. There’s no money, only a cut of the box office. But it’s good work. It is great work!’
She is playing the mother in
The
Glass
Menagerie.
By coincidence, the pub is at the end of my street. I tell her I am delighted.
‘You will come and see me, won’t you?’
‘But yes.’
‘I often wonder if you’re still upset about that holiday.’
We have never discussed it, but now she is in the mood.
‘I’ve thought about it a thousand times. I wish Archie hadn’t come.’
I laugh. It is too late; how could it matter now? ‘I mean, I wish I hadn’t brought him. Sitting in that stationary train with you scowling was the worst moment of my life. But I had thought I was going mad. I had been looking forward to the holiday. The night before we were to leave, Archie asked again if I wanted him to come. He could feel how troubled I was. As I packed I realised that if we went away together my marriage would shatter. You were about to go to America. Your film would make you successful. Women would want you. I knew you didn’t really want me.’
This is hard. But I understand that Archie is too self-absorbed to be disturbed by her. He asks for and takes everything. He does not see her as a problem he has to solve, as I do. She has done the sensible thing, finding a man she cannot make mad.
She goes on, ‘I required Archie’s strength and security more than passion – or love. That
was
love, to me. He asked, too, if I were having an affair.’
‘To prove that you weren’t, you invited him to come.’
She puts her hand on my arm. ‘I’ll do anything now. Say the word.’
I cannot think of anything I want her to do.
For a few weeks I do not see her. We are both rehearsing. One Saturday, my wife Helen is pushing the kid in a trolley in the supermarket as I wander about with a basket. Florence comes round a corner and we begin talking at once. She is enjoying the rehearsals. The director does not push her far enough – ‘Rob, I can do much morel’ – but he will not be with her on stage, where she feels ‘queenlike’. ‘Anyhow, we’ve become friends,’ she says meaningfully.
Archie does not like her acting; he does not want strangers looking at her, but he is wise enough to let her follow her wishes. She has got an agent; she is seeking more work. She believes she will
make it.
After our spouses have packed away their groceries, Archie comes over and we are introduced again. He is large; his hair sticks out, his face is ruddy and his eyebrows look like a patch of corn from which a heavy creature has recently risen. Helen looks across suspiciously. Florence and I are standing close to one another; perhaps one of us is touching the other.
At home I go into my room, hoping Helen will not knock. I suspect she won’t ask me who Florence is. She will want to
know so much that she won’t want to find out.
Without having seen the production, I rouse myself to invite several people from the film and theatre world to see Florence’s play. Drinking in the pub beforehand, I can see that to the director’s surprise the theatre will be full; he is wondering where all these smart people in deluxe loafers have come from, scattered amongst the customary drinkers with their elbows on the beer-splashed bar, watching football on television with their heads craned up, as if looking for an astronomical wonder. I become apprehensive myself, questioning my confidence in Florence and wondering how much of it is gratitude for her encouragement of me. Even if I have put away my judgement, what does it matter? I seem to have known her for so long that she is not to be evaluated or criticised but is just a fact of my life. The last time we met in the teahouse she told me that eighteen months ago she had a benign lump removed from behind her ear. The fear that it will return has given her a new fervency.
The bell rings. We go through a door marked ‘Theatre and Toilets’ and gropingly make our way down the steep, worn stairs into a cellar, converted into a small theatre. The programme is a single sheet, handed to us by the director as we go in. The room smells musty, and despite the dark the place is shoddy; there is a pillar in front of me I could rest my cheek on. Outside I hear car alarms, and from upstairs the sound of cheering men. But in this small room the silence is charged by concentration and the hope of some home-made magnificence.
For the first time in years I am reminded of the purity and intensity of the theatre.
When I get out at the interval I notice Archie pulling himself up the stairs behind me. At the top, panting, he takes my arm to steady himself. I buy a drink, and, in order to be alone, go and stand outside the pub. I am afraid that if my friends, the ‘important’ people, remain after the interval it is because I would disapprove if they left; and if they praise Florence to me, it is only because they would have guessed the ulterior connection. The depth and passion Florence has on stage is clear to me. But I know that what an artist finds interesting about their own work, the part they consider original and penetrating, will not necessarily compel an audience, who might not even notice it, but only attend to the story.
Archie’s head pokes around the pub door. His eyes find me and he comes out. I notice he has his son, Ben, with him.
‘Hallo, Rob, where’s Matt?’ says Ben.
‘Mart’s my son,’ I explain to Archie. ‘He’s in bed, I hope.’
‘You happen to know one another?’ Archie says.
I tug at Ben’s baseball cap. ‘We bump into one another in the park.’
‘In the teahouse,’ says the boy. ‘He and Mummy love to talk.’ He looks at me. ‘She would love to act in a film you were in. So would I. I’m going to be an actor. The boys at school think you’re the best.’
‘Thank you.’ I look at Archie. ‘Expensive school too, I bet.’
He stands there looking away, but his mind is working.
I say to Ben, ‘What do you think of Mummy in this play?’
‘Brilliant.’
‘What is your true opinion?’ says Archie to me. ‘As a man of the theatre and film?’
‘She seems at ease on stage.’
‘Will she go any further?’
‘The more she does it, the better she will get.’
‘Is that how it works?’ he says. ‘Is that how you made it?’
‘Partly. I am talented, too.’
He looks at me with hatred and says, ‘She will do it more, you think?’
‘If she is to improve she will have to.’
He seems both proud and annoyed, with a cloudy look, as if the familiar world is disappearing into the mist. Until now she has followed him. I wonder whether he will be able to follow her, and whether she will want him to.
I have gone inside and found my friends, when he is at my elbow, interrupting, with something urgent to say.
‘I love Florence more and more as time passes,’ he tells me. ‘Just wanted you to know that.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Good.’
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Right. See you downstairs.’
After a lunch of soup, bread and tomato salad, John and Dina go out on to the street. At the bottom of the steps they stop for a moment and he slips his arm through hers as he always does. They have been keen to establish little regularities, to confirm that they are used to doing things together.
Today the sun beats down and the city streets seem deserted, as if everyone but them has gone on holiday. At the moment they feel they are on a kind of holiday themselves.
They would prefer to carry blankets, cushions, the radio and numerous lotions out on to the patio. Weeds push up between the paving stones and cats lie on the creeper at the top of the fence as the couple lie there in the afternoons, reading, drinking fizzy lemonade and thinking over all that has happened.
Except that the store has rung to say the four blue chairs are ready. Dina and John can’t wait for them to be delivered, but must fetch them this afternoon because Henry is coming to supper tonight. They shopped yesterday; of the several meals they have learned to prepare, they will have salmon steaks, broccoli, new potatoes and three-bean salad.
Henry will be their first dinner guest. In fact he will be their first visitor.
John and Dina have been in the rented flat two and a half months already and most of the furniture, if not what they would have chosen themselves, is acceptable, particularly the bookshelves in all the rooms, which they have wiped down with wet cloths. Dina is intending to fetch the rest of her books and her desk, which pleases him. After that, it seems to him, there will be no going back. The wooden table in the kitchen is adequate. Three people could sit comfortably around it to eat, talk and drink. They have two brightly coloured table cloths, which they bought in India.
They have started to put their things on the table, mixed up together. She will set something out, experimentally, and he will look at it as if to say, what’s that?, and she watches him; then they look at one another and an agreement is reached, or not. Their pens, for instance, are now in a shaving mug; her vase is next to it; his plaster Buddha appeared on the table this morning and was passed without demur. The picture of the cat was not passed, but she won’t remove it at the moment, in order to test him. There are photographs of them together, on the break they took a year ago when they were both still living with their former partners. There are photographs of his children.
At the moment there are only two rotten kitchen chairs.
John has said that Henry, whom she met once before at a dinner given by one of John’s friends, will take an interest in the blue chairs with the cane seats. Henry will take an interest in almost anything, if it is presented enthusiastically.
It has only been after some delicate but amiable discussion that they finally agreed to go ahead with Henry. John and Dina like to talk. In fact she gave up her job so they could talk more. Sometimes they do it with their faces pressed together; sometimes with their backs to one another. They go to bed early so they can talk. The one thing they don’t like is disagreement. They imagine that if they start disagreeing they will never stop, and that there will be a war. They have had wars and they have almost walked out on one another on several occasions. But it is the disagreements they have had before, with other people, and the fear they will return, that seem to be making them nervous at the moment.
But they have agreed that Henry will be a good choice as a first guest. He lives nearby and he lives alone. He loves being asked out. As he works near Carluccios he will bring exotic cakes. There won’t be any silences, difficult or otherwise.
*
They first saw the blue chairs four days ago. They were looking for an Indian restaurant nearby, and were discussing their ideal Indian menu, how they would choose the dall from this restaurant on King Street, and the bhuna prawn from the takeaway on the Fulham Road, and so on, when they drifted into Habitat. Maybe they were tired or just felt indolent, but in the big store they found themselves sitting in various armchairs, on the sofas, at the tables, and even lying in the deckchairs, imagining they were together in this or that place by the sea or in the mountains, occasionally looking at one another, far
away across the shop, or closer, side by side, thinking in astonishment, this is him, this is her, the one I’ve chosen, the one I’ve wanted all this time, and now it has really started, everything I have wished for is today.
There seemed to be no one in the shop to mind their ruminations. They lost track of time. Then a shop assistant stepped out from behind a pillar. And the four blue wooden chairs, with the cane seats – after much sitting down, standing up and shuffling of their bottoms – were agreed on. There were other chairs they wanted, but it turned out they were not in the sale, and they had to take these cheaper ones. As they left, Dina said she preferred them. He said that if she preferred them, he did too.
*
Today on the way to the store she insists on buying a small frame and a postcard of a flower to go in it. She says she is intending to put this on the table.
‘When Henry’s there?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’
During the first weeks of their living together he has found himself balking at the way she does certain things, things he had not noticed during their affair, or hadn’t had time to get used to. For instance the way she likes to eat sitting on the front steps in the evening. He is too old for bohemianism, but he can’t keep saying ‘No’ to everything and he has to sit there with pollution going in his bowl of pasta and the neighbours observing him, and men looking at her. He knows that this is
part of the new life he has longed for, and at these times he feels helpless. He can’t afford to have it go wrong.
The assistant in the store says he will fetch the chairs and they will be ready downstairs in a few minutes. At last two men bring the chairs out and stand them at the store exit.
John and Dina are surprised to see that the chairs haven’t come individually, or with just a little wrapping. They are in two long brown boxes, like a couple of coffins.
John has already said they can carry the chairs to the tube, and then do the same from there to the flat. It isn’t far. She thought he was being flippant. She can see now that he was serious.
To show how it must be done, and indeed that it is possible, he gets a good grip on one box, kicks it at the bottom, and shoves it right out of the shop and then along the smooth floor of the shopping centre, past the sweet seller and security guard and the old women sitting on benches.
At the exit he turns and sees her standing in the shop entrance, watching him, laughing. He thinks how lovely she is and what a good time they always have together.
She starts to follow him, pushing her box as he did his.
He continues, thinking that this is how they will do it, they will soon be at the tube station.
But outside the shopping mall, on the hot pavement, the box sticks. You can’t shove cardboard along on concrete; it won’t go. That morning she suggested they borrow a car. He had said they wouldn’t be able to park nearby. Perhaps they
would get a taxi. But outside it is a one-way street, going in the wrong direction. He sees that there are no taxis. The boxes wouldn’t fit in anyway.
Out there on the street, in the sun, he squats a little. He gets his arms around the box. It is as if he is hugging a tree. Making all kinds of involuntary and regrettable sounds, he lifts it right up. Even if he can’t see where he is going, even if his nose is pushed into the cardboard, he is carrying it, he is moving. They are still on their way.
He doesn’t get far. Different parts of his body are resisting. He will ache tomorrow. He puts the box down again. In fact he almost drops it. He looks back to see that Dina is touching the corners of her eyes, as if she is crying with laughter. Truly it is a baking afternoon and it was an awful idea to invite Henry over.
He is about to shout back at her, asking her whether she has any better ideas, but watching her, he can see that she does. She is full of better ideas about everything. If only he trusted her rather than himself – thinking he is always right – he would be better off.
She does this remarkable thing.
She lifts her box onto her hip and, holding it by the cardboard flap, starts to walk with it. She walks right past him, stately and upright, like an African woman with a goat on her shoulders, as if this is the most natural thing. Off she goes towards the tube. This, clearly, is how to do it.
He does the same, the whole African woman upright stance.
But after a few steps the flap of the cardboard rips. It rips right across and the box drops to the ground. He can’t go on. He doesn’t know what to do.
He is embarrassed and thinks people are looking at him and laughing. People are indeed doing this, looking at him with the box, and at the beautiful woman with the other box. And they look back at him and then at her, and they are splitting their sides, as if nothing similar has ever happened to them. He likes to think he doesn’t care, that he is strong enough at his age to withstand mockery. But he sees himself, in their eyes, as a foolish little man, with the things he has wanted and hoped for futile and empty, reduced to the ridiculous shoving of this box along the street in the sun.
You might be in love, but whether you can get four chairs home together is another matter.
She comes back to him and stands there. He is looking away and is furious. She says there’s only one thing for it.
‘All right,’ he says, an impatient man trying to be patient. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
‘Take it easy,’ she says. ‘Calm down.’
‘I’m trying to,’ he replies.
‘Squat down,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘Squat down.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. Where do you think?’
He squats down with his arms out and she grips the box in
the tree-hugging pose and tips it and lays it across his hands and on top of his head. With this weight pushing down into his skull he attempts to stand, as Olympic weight lifters do, using their knees. Unlike those Olympic heroes he finds himself pitching forward. People in the vicinity are no longer laughing. They are alarmed and shouting warnings and scattering. He is staggering about with the box on his head, a drunken Atlas, and she is dancing around him, saying, ‘Steady, steady.’ Not only that, he is about to hurl the chairs into the traffic.
A man passing by sets the box down for them.
‘Thank you‚’ says Dina.
She looks at John.
‘Thank you‚’ says John sullenly.
He stands there, breathing hard. There is sweat on his upper lip. His whole face is damp. His hair is wet and his skull itching. He is not in good shape. He could die soon, suddenly, as his father did.
Without looking at her, he picks up the box in the tree-hugging stance and takes it a few yards, shuffling. He puts it down and picks it up again. He covers a few more yards. She follows.
Once they are on the tube he suspects they will be all right. It is only one stop. But when they have got out of the train they find that getting the boxes along the station is almost impossible. The tree-hugging stance is getting too difficult. They carry one box between them up the stairs, and then
return for the other. She is quiet now; he can see she is tiring, and is bored with this idiocy.
At the entrance to the station she asks the newspaper seller if they can leave one of the boxes with him. They can carry one home together and return for the other. The man agrees.
She stands in front of John with her arms at her side and her hands stuck out like a couple of rabbit ears, into which shape the box is then placed. As they walk he watches her in her green sleeveless top with a collar, the sling of her bag crossing her shoulder, and the back of her long neck.
He thinks that if they have to put the box down everything will fail. But although they stop three times, she is concentrating, they both are, and they don’t put the box down.
They reach the bottom of the steps to the house. At last they stand the box upright, in the cool hall, and sigh with relief. They return for the other box. They have found a method. They carry it out efficiently.
When it is done he rubs and kisses her sore hands. She looks away.
Without speaking they pull the blue chairs with the cane seats from the boxes and throw the wrapping in the corner. They put the chairs round the table and look at them. They sit on them. They place themselves in this position and that. They put their feet up on them. They change the table cloth.
‘This is good‚’ he says.
She sits down and puts her elbows on the table, looking down at the table cloth. She is crying. He touches her hair.
He goes to the shop for some lemonade and when he gets back she has taken off her shoes and is lying flat out on the kitchen floor.
‘I’m tired now‚’ she says.
He makes her a drink and places it on the floor. He lies down beside her with his hands under his head. After a time she turns to him and strokes his arm.
‘Are you OK?’ he says.
She smiles at him. ‘Yes.’
Soon they will open the wine and start to make supper; soon Henry will arrive and they will eat and talk.
They will go to bed and in the morning at breakfast time, when they put the butter and jam and marmalade out, the four blue chairs will be there, around the table of their love.